Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?
by Espantalho
Summary: My part of a Twister fanfiction trade with Shadow Griffin  A Twister fanfiction centering on the character Haynes.  Which of these characters is not like the others?  Read on and see.


_Author's Note: What's that you say? Why yes, yes I do own __Twister__! How did you guess? I am responsible for everything they put on the TV screen! In fact, I invented TV!! BWA-HA-HA-HAAAA!!!_

_No, seriously._

_Dedicated with much love to __**Shadow Griffin**__. I hope that I don't disappoint!_

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_A Haynes-Centric Twister Fanfiction_

Ever since she was ten years old, Haynes had never known just how she fit in. At ten, she'd been tall for her age, geeky and gangly, braces and glasses and a long plait of hair. She'd been obsessed with nature, and spent her time at recess not with the girls and their games of House and Hopskotch, nor with the boys and their bellowing games of basketball. She'd avoided the swings and the monkey bars and the games of King's Corners. She'd spent most of her time, actually, looking at rocks.

"Why don't you marry them, if you like them so much?" Speckly Andrew Bennet had laughed, firing his slingshot past her as he ran. She'd narrowed her eyes and picked up a smooth, long rock. Even then she'd identified it for what it was – aerodynamically perfect. It had hit him right on his rear end, and he'd looked back at her for a minute as if deciding whether or not to fight her. He'd decided against it. She'd gone back to her rocks.

In short, she was unusual, and she never really knew why. She'd stayed that way all through high school and college, and remained so to this day.

Haynes reflected, as she stared at the wall cloud in front of her through black binoculars, that she'd ended up in the best possible place for a misfit girl like herself. Though only 23, she'd had enough of trying to fit in with corporate worlds and even dating prospects. She'd ended up on a storm-chasing team from her alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, and here she remained, happy with her comrades and her work.

Sometimes, though, she still felt like she was the odd man out.

She'd learned to face facts. Sharp reality had only managed to sting her a few times throughout her adolescence and the years following it, mostly because she was a bit of a recluse when not around people she knew and trusted. She'd faced up to her lot in life after embarrassingly asking a baseball player to the prom, and being rudely turned down in front of a sizable crowd. She was a geek, but, she liked to think, and think often, a cool one.

Her crowd was the same way, but she was still the dark duck. It wasn't because she was a girl – Jo was a girl, but Jo was the fearless leader, cool, confident, and beautiful. It wasn't because of her initial hermitlike behavior – in the very beginning, she'd been perfectly matched for cautiousness by Eddie and timidness by Laurence. It couldn't be her newfound loudmouth tendencies – Dusty was more than equal to her most loquacious outbursts.

She chose, one day, to confront this feeling.

"Dusty!"

"Yo yo yo!" Dusty returned, balancing his goggles on the bridge of his nose so that he looked peculiarly like a four-eyed, pale creature from the SciFi channel.

"Do you think I'm… I don't know, weirder or more different than the rest of the team?"

Dusty considered her for a minute, then pointed to his temple and spun the finger on its axis a couple of times, winking at her. "Honey, we're _all_ a little different! Ha ha ha!" He spread his arms to indicate the entire team spread out on the haystacks around them, herself included.

"Which of these things is not like the others?" he demanded, suddenly serious, squinting at her.

Haynes looked around; Laurence being scolded by Jo for jamming the focus mount with grass, Rabbit and Sanders arguing about maps, Beltzer rewiring Dorothy 1, Preacher taking directional measurements, Dusty spread out on a lawn chair and drinking through a bright orange straw, and she herself, watching them.

And she remembered the other team, Jonas with his single-minded obsession with professionalism, Bill who couldn't seem to decide what was good for him, Bubba the gentle giant, Willie and Flanders the unsure rookies, Charles the reassuring jokester, Patty the slightly-misfit pixie, and Eddie the more-than-slightly neurotic engineer. A smile grew on her face as she realized what he meant.

"None of them," she laughed.

"Or," Dusty wagged his finger at her philosophically, "All of them!"

She looked at him, and understood, and laughed. "Dusty, you're insane." She stood and smacked his leg with her hat. "Get up and do something, will ya?"

She tore out before he could hatch his revenge, racing back to where Beltzer stood with his laptop.

He looked up. "Where were you?"

Haynes shaded her eyes and turned on her radio. "Having a revelation."

"About what?"

She grinned and turned the tuning dial.

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_Author's Note: Short but... sweet? I dunno! I like it, what do you think?_


End file.
